Glass is Elastic is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see – what do we know – in a world experienced through lenses and screens? 'Don’t blink. Nobody’s / looking, nobody’s seeing.' Jon Glover explores the treachery and creativity inherent in the eye’s lens, in the eyeball itself, in a microscope or camera, in a telescope, in the mysterious properties of glass, malleable as time itself. We translate the shape of the world into maps, pixels, mathematical data; into stories that change in the telling.

A central poem sequence links medicine, war and vision in the glass slides assembled in a pathology lab for research into narcolepsy after the First World War, nerves and brains laid bare as evidence, as names on a war memorial.

In language that combines scientific rigour with the supple everyday, Glover surprises the reader into looking, into seeing the connections in a beautiful, frightening world.


Cover photograph Paul Maddern, Keel 14. Copyright © Paul Maddern, reproduced by permission